82 Desire

retrieved her flashlight from the car and walked back toward the United building, trying to cover the same ground Beau would have covered, shining the light in every doorway, playing it over every sleeping body. Most of the bodies stirred, and those that didn’t weren’t Beau either.
    She was glad to see a guard in the lobby of the building, and he was glad to help out a police officer, but unfortunately he didn’t know Beau’s car. He let her use the phone to call Deb Cavignac. “His car?” Cavignac was getting steadily more hysterical. “Why, do you know something? “
    “I’m trying to find him.”
    Finally someone else snatched the phone, a daughter presumably. “It’s a white Lexus, last year’s.”
    He probably hadn’t parked it on the street then. She said, “Does your mother know where he usually parks it?”
    The girl conferred with her mother and came back on the line. “In a parking lot. Fairly near.” She gave directions.
    Skip was on her way to the lot, still searching doorways for bodies, when one of the bodies spoke to her. “You lookin’ for the dead guy?”
    The speaker was a white male, maybe thirty, maybe sixty, his body thin and stringy with alcohol abuse. His eyes remained closed.
    “What did you say?”
    “Dead man over there.” The body didn’t move.
    Skip said, “Open your eyes and look at me.”
    “Don’t have no interest in women.”
    “Get up. Now. I’m a police officer.”
    He opened a pair of eyes decorated with red nets. She almost wished he’d kept them closed.
    But something about her must have impressed him. Laboriously, he sat up. “Knew you wanted the dead guy.” This time he got up the energy to turn toward downtown and point. “Over there. Behind the garbage.”
    The street he indicated was little more than an alley. Someone had left a lot of trash on the narrow sidewalk in front of one of the buildings. From where Skip stood, you couldn’t see what was on the other side.
    “Okay, show me.”
    “I just showed you.”
    “Come on. Let’s go.” If this guy knew something, she sure wasn’t going to run the risk of losing him.
    “Shit. You try to be a good citizen and this is the shit you get. Can you beat that, man? This is the shit you get. What kind of shit is this, man?”
    He unfolded himself very slowly and carefully. She herded him over to the place he meant, disregarding his mumbled complaints, which didn’t cease for a second. As soon as they got close to the first of a number of discarded boxes, she saw the foot, a well-shod one obviously not belonging to a street person. She edged forward a little more.
    Her informant was nodding vigorously. “They hit him and stabbed him both. Killed him two different ways.” He nearly collapsed laughing, seemingly so incapacitated that she risked getting closer to the man on the ground. He was lying on his side and wearing a suit.
    “Beau?” she said. He didn’t answer and didn’t move.
    She said to the witness, “What’s your name?”
    “George Trulock.”
    “George, do you have some ID?”
    “You kiddin’?” George fell into another of his laughing fits.
    “Okay, come with me.” She walked him to the nearest car and handcuffed him to the door. “Hang out here a minute, will you?”
    “You can’t pull this shit on me. For Christ’s sake, I ain’t done nothin’…”
    She tuned him out, bent over the body, and turned it far enough over to see the face. It was Beau.
    Dead. Dead with a hole in his jacket and blood all over his chest.
    George might well have been right—he could have been hit and stabbed.
    Skip called for backup.
    After an eternity, a district car arrived, its young, eager driver ready to kick butt. They waited for more help, the coroner, and the crime lab. This was the Eighth District, whose homicides would normally be investigated not by its own detectives but by Cold Cases, which was all that was left of Homicide. She’d worked with these guys, and anyway, they had no reason to be territorial—she’d have no trouble getting assigned to the case.
    She turned back to George. “What happened here?”
    “I told ya. They killed him twice.”
    “Who did?”
    “Black kids. Who else?”
    “What’d they look like?”
    “How would I know? I didn’t see it.”
    Damn. She should have known. “You must have some reason for thinking that black kids killed him.” Sure he must. He’s stoned out of his gourd and probably a racist. That’s two reasons.
    But he